Startup: Google Blacklisting ‘Ethereum’ As Ad Keyword

Ethereum ETH Google Ad Blacklist

Cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH)–It appears that cryptocurrency has not fully turned on the corner on last year’s combined ban by Facebook, Twitter and Google.

According to reports by auditing startup Decenter, Google has allegedly blacklisted the term ‘ethereum’ for its advertising platform Google ads. In a tweet published on Jan 10., the company accused Google Ads of imposing some bias towards the keyword Ethereum, stating

“We are seeing a hard stop on Google Ads containing “Ethereum” as the keyword in the last two days. Is anyone else noticing the same change? Where [sic] there any new policy changes introduced @GoogleAds?”

The tweet included an accompanying image demonstrating what is presumed to be an attempt at using Ethereum for an ad word, with the reply message indicating that the term would not be permitted for key words.

Google Ads, through their official Twitter account, responded to the inquiry by stating

“Advertisers may promote cryptocurrency exchanges that target the United States and Japan. Hence, you may not be able to run ads which target other countries.”

While the message indicates that would be advertisers should be able to use Ethereum in campaigns targeted towards U.S. and Japanese based customers, Decenter reports not being able to do either. The company replied to the Google Ad update, explaining their situation,

We’re actually a developers team doing smart contract security audits so we’re seeing this error for keywords such as “ethereum security audits” and “ethereum development services”. Would you say that this is expected behaviour or can we fix it some way?

Rather than handling the situation via Twitter, the official Google Ads account pointed Decenter to their webpage on cryptocurrency policies, leaving many investors and developers scratching their heads over whether ‘Ethereum’ and its derivatives has indeed been blacklisted by the search engine giant.




